Thursday, March 26, 2020

Robert M. Kingdon on the Death Penalty for Adultery in Calvin’s Geneva



In his Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva, Robert Kingdon discusses a number of individuals who were executed for committing adultery (usually drowning for women; decapitation for men), including the following:

Anne Le Moine and Antoine Cossonex

The first case of an adultery charge that led to a death penalty that we shall examine is that of Anne Le Moine, wife of Pierre Bernard, and her lover, Antoine Cossonex. Anne and Antoine were first jailed for cross-examination by Geneva’s Lieutenant on August 7, 1560. The case moved with horrifying speed. A little more than a week later they were both put to death.

Pierre Bernard and Antoine Cossonex were both members of Geneva’s flourishing community of French refugees, then so large that it constituted about half of the total population. Pierre was a merchant who had originally come from Chinon, not far from Tours in the Touraine. Antoine had come from a village in the south of France, not far from Toulouse. Pierre and Anne had been married for twenty-six years and had a number of children, several of whom were already married. Antoine had been in their service for three and a half years.

The case began with interrogations of four people: the two accused—Anne Le Moine and Antoine Cossonex; the aggrieved husband, Pierre Bernard, and Bernard’s teen-age daughter, Esther. Anne and Antoine were charged with repeated adultery and blasphemy. Antoine in addition was charged with the attempted rape of Esther and with domestic larceny. Anne’s initial response to the charges was that her husband treated her very badly and had often beaten her. Esther insisted that she had not led Antoine on, that she had no interest in marrying him. In the course of the investigation, the Lieutenant discovered evidence that Anne had also committed adultery with another man in the community, about two years earlier. Pierre was clearly appalled by all these revelations.

After about a week of intensive questioning, it was decided that torture would probably be needed, and Germain Colladon was consulted. He found ample grounds for the use of torture and it was promptly applied, in increasingly severe doses of the estrapade. In this case the torture worked. Antoine fell to pieces immediately and completely. The details of his recorded confessions are much more graphic than in most Geneavan proceedings of this type. He admitted committing adultery with Anne repeatedly over the previous eight months, “even in the bed of the master,” most recently only about a week earlier and twice within the same day, very likely the incidents that led to this trial. Only a few days before that, he reported, Anne had given him as a present a lock of her pubic hair wrapped up in paper. He also fully admitted the attempted rape of her lover’s daughter, reporting that he kissed her, fondled her breasts and genitals, and rubbed his penis against her body, but that she had stopped him from going any further.

Anne Le Moine also cracked under the pressure of torture, but with somewhat different results. Rather than confessing her crimes in graphic detail, she erupted in anger, insulting her husband, the court, and everyone else involved in the process, saying things that led her judges to add blasphemy to the list of charges against her. She said that she wanted to be damned with all the devils to the deepest depths of hell, that she hoped to spend eternity with them at the bottom of the abysmal lake, and other things that the record summarizes as “detestable and abominable.”

Faced with this fresh evidence, Colladon immediately issued an opinion recommending the penalty of death for both. He rehearsed the evidence drawn from their confessions with evident horror. He backed up his recommendation with uncommon precision, citing relevant commandments from the Bible, specifically Leviticus 20, and relevant passages from “imperial” (Roman) law against both adultery and blasphemy. He found Antoine guilty of adultery, domestic larceny, and incest—since he had tried to seduce his own lover’s daughter. Antoine thus deserved the death penalty several times over. As for Anne, her crimes were so atrocious that she deserved to be exterminated completely, at the very least to be put to death by drowning.

A full bill of charges was then drawn up accusing both Anne and Antoine of multiple crimes, listing not only all the crimes that they had been charged with up to this point but stuffing in some additional ones. They had committed adultery several times in several places, even on the bed of her own husband. In so doing Anne “had polluted and soiled, and broken the faith of the holy state of marriage.” Antoine was also guilty of incest, for having attempted to rape the daughter of his master and mistress. And Anne was guilty of a whole series of additional crimes. She had contemplated killing her husband so that she could marry her lover. She had stolen pieces of cloth from her husband so that her lover could be dressed better. She had kissed a number of other men. She had a duplicate key made to the family cupboard, and then used it several times to steal silverware. She had replied to her husband’s attempts to correct her with “insults and outrages.” She had in the end committed blasphemy in the presence of both her husband and the court.

In this case the Small Council had no hesitation about levying the death penalty. Indeed its members insisted on executions the very next day. The municipal executioner happened to be ill on the day upon which the trial ended, and it was decided to borrow an executioner from another community if necessary, rather than considering any delay (Archives d’Etat de Genève, Jur. Pen. A 2, fol. 106v., 15 August 1560). The formal sentence of condemnation notified the parties that Anne would be “bound and led out of the city down the Corraterie Street and there to be drowned and submerged in the water of the Rhone River,” and that Antoine would be “bound and led to the lace of Champel [the public execution ground] and there to have the head cut from above the shoulders in the usual way, and your head attached to the gallows and your body hung from it, so that your souls be separated from your bodies.” The sentences were executed immediately.

It became a fixed part of Genevan law that these two rather different forms of execution be used in cases of notorious adultery. There is no clear explanation in the law as to why men should be decapitated and women drowned, but that became the rule. There is also no evidence that Geneva ever considered adopting the method of executing by public stoning recommended by the Bible. It may be that Geneva wished to confine the process of execution to professionals, and not to encourage the intervention of the public. The biblical method of putting adulterers to death was clearly a public process, involving even casual bystanders. Any attempt to use this method of execution may well have been thought likely to encourage riots and other forms of disorderly conduct by crowds that could easily escape official control. (Robert M. Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva [Harvard Historical Studies 118; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, 1997], 119-23; the other examples of those executed that Kingdon discusses are that of Jacques Lenepveux [pp 123-26], Bernardine Neyrod [pp. 126-28], Marie Binot [pp. 129-35], and Loise Maistre [pp 135-39])